In Cameroon, parents don't name their babies right away. When I told this to a friend in the US, she exclaimed, 'What a good idea! They get to know the baby first, so they can choose a name that fits!" That isn't why Cameroonian parents wait, but it works for my blog.

Friday, February 6, 2009

If there is ever an award for “The World’s Best Person”, I will nominate Coneilia. Here is the kind of person she is: Last Saturday, she got home from work around 1:00. She was tired and wanted to rest, but it is the only day that she has free for housework, so she started doing her laundry (by hand, of course. She has no machine, and couldn’t afford to run it if she did.) Almost immediately she got a phone call from one of her neighbors. The neighbor and her daughter had been in a car accident and were bleeding by the side of the road. They called Coneilia (as every one does when they’re in trouble.) She dropped what she was doing, took a taxi to meet them, took them to a clinic and waited. And waited. Eventually she went in to see what was going on. She found her friends still bleeding, albeit through some bandages. She asked if they were going to get stitches, and she was assured that it wasn’t necessary. So she tried to raise some cain. “You can’t just leave them like this! They’re still bleeding! If you don’t stitch them up, I’ll take them somewhere where they will.” The clinic staff told her that she couldn’t move them: they needed to stay for at least three days, for observation. Coneilia got them out of there, into another taxi and to another clinic, this one a very good one operated by our church. Her friend had a total of nearly thirty stitches in her stomach and head. I said, “So they might have bled to death in that first clinic without you.” Coneilia said, “Yes, those lazy people would have let them bleed to death.” I told her I hope that if she is ever in trouble, all of the people that she has helped will help her. She seemed surprised and assured me that they would. That’s the kind of person she is.